The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  The moon rose tiny and quiet in the beige night sky. In the vagueness before dawn I sucked on a piece of ancient gum in my sleep. Seth woke me I’m fucking thick for you he sobbed. Allow my passion to interfere with your progress… Opening my eyes, he raised me to his level, inching me neatly over his cock. After a minute I said I’d rather put it in my mouth, letting my gaze fall to the floor where my hand traced the path of rain on one side of the windshield… My eyes saw foggy and pale and I stooped over to drain his hilarious rage. Suck fuck sick again. Barf it up and the streams will flow to heaven on a song lit like a purple cloud. Please shut up I heard myself say. I went into the bathroom. Did not come out for several hours. His breath billowed in under the door toward me as I sat on the sink pondering my fate. Is it cruel to live this way? Why did they all choose me? Love me so much, hold me so tight? What’s so fucked about me that makes them so luvey, so cummey, so angry they can’t stop smiling?… A middle-aged man in a button-down shirt motioned for me to follow him into his car. We arrived at a sparsely furnished apartment in black lacquer and mauve. When he was in the bathroom I cautiously peered into the refrigerator for something to eat. Bottled water, a bag of muffins, a jar of mayonnaise. I found a packet of fast food hot sauce and squirted the contents anxiously into my mouth. He came back and asked me if anybody had come to the door before sidling up, making a raspy coo at the bottom of his throat as he yanked my sweatshirt over my head. Later, after consuming more and more packets I found between cushions, I had a spicy headache throbbing in my aching throat. He had me bent over the arm of the couch, his palm held against my back. Birds flew from their lawn-chair perches, chirping outside the sliding door as he pulled out. Streams of cobwebs engulfed the room. He gagged a little on his abundant pleasure then retreated into the worn embrace of his creased trousers… There was always a kernel of ecstasy at the center of atrocious mischief, the annihilation seed that makes the pearl… sleeping sleeping sleeping… I can’t wake up by myself anymore; somebody has to be there to open my eyelids for me and force some sun into them — but I don’t wake as if surfacing in a lake; I cry up, snap up and throw a fist in the direction of onlookers. I burn my bed in the campfire and stomp into town.

  By the early hours of the morning the rockabilly girls were passed out on a pallet by the dead fire. They seemed interchangeable to me, bony and malleable with just a touch of death. They want me to teach them, I will.

  Textured drywall, paint holidays… revealing on closer inspection images in plaster cloud formations: debauched ceremonies at cocktail parties, couch cushions that tasted like sweat, an overstuffed ottoman that doubled as a coffee table. All bad things. One evening there was a girl passed out on the couch, her face wedged in where cushions met, shutting out the light to keep from barfing all over everyone she was so grossed out. Inquisitive gazes kept her there. All kinds of scented candles and voices were present. A cordless phone pulsed and was answered. In hushed tones. The pizza was here. Cut carrots, endive, and radish were dipped and consumed. Rattan bar stools were pulled out and pushed in to accommodate one or more pairs of stuffed Dockers. The air was thick with ground bone, sugar, and oil. Small fires sealed icy fists in coalpits in each corner of the balcony. Inside thegirl brought her hands up to her hot breath, separating the perpendicular cushions in front of her face; found some nickels, crumbs, and a passage to the other side of the house: an angle high in the Tudor rafters of the vaulted ceiling in the back bedroom where a ceremony was in session, a rite of passion. There stood several dark cloaked figures around an unmade daybed. When she crept closer she could see that they were only half human, their flesh ended where the cloaks began like ceramic doll faces stitched onto cloth forms. She circled around above them and could see a ring of frantic fists pumping away at cocks set off against black velvet. The object of their affection lay braced against two such staffs, her own hands powerless to resist the urge to yank on the display around her. Smoke seeped up from the corners of the room, let off from the convolution of carpet staples doubling over folds at the baseboard. Every time a clock chimed one blew a load on her skin, each sizzling and evaporating on contact into a small puff of orange smoke. They marked her, leaving amorphous, raised stains, curdled clouds that despite superficial beginnings, penetrated the exterior layer to eventually mark her very being. Several seeds of hate chimed and etched an indelible longing into her soul and she was altered forever, bearing these badges of annihilation like dashes marking out the seconds of an hour, notches traveling toward 0. The participants soon dissipated and she was alone; the force from the impact of the chimes caused her sight to be drowned out by a black cloud that overtook the room at intervals matching every heartbeat. Her ears were closed to the outside. She heard no sound but the hot suffocating hiss of blood tracing the confines of her veins. Her body remained untouched but for the curdled marks on her flesh, pressing in on her from all sides. She was imploding… There are better places to go than the forest. Grocery store aisles were mind devices assisting a systematic forgetting of forests and their harbors of wickedness. Kim and I went to one in the middle of the night on Thanksgiving when nothing else was open. Nobody else was around. Even the guy who worked the register was away in another part of the store. We were hanging out, looking at magazines, sitting below an aisle somewhere in the back. She grabbed a box of granola bars off the shelf and threw one in my lap and sat and watched me while I ate one of every flavor. I brushed my hand across her knee and she swooped in like a rare storm. She had a habit of dissolving right in front of my eyes. And at this moment I felt her fading away slowly, falling out of view.

  I walked around town looking for answers. I threw up elbows to anyone who stood in my path. Hit onlookers who laughed. I had enough; the door slammed and I ran for days, as fast as I could till on the fourth day I slipped and fell into a pit dug in the ground especially for the occasion. I was fed stolen food but became ill and slept most of the day to stave off dying. I cough and cough out tears, my hand barely moves up to sweep them away before they freeze on my face. Cough syrup pours down my throat and my head spins. Weeks pass, clothes become shredded by the jagged walls of the pit, body fat dissolves into cramps, hair falls out in patches, each strand worming its way deeper and deeper into the earth. Some carried off by birds. Night after night strange men offer me food — what could I do? Turn my head away? Eat prehistoric ore nestled under layers of dirt and earthly debris instead? When I came to my hearing cut out and my hands were fixed in an open palm, numb and tingling. I was told I had passed out and was moved to a remote location, on a walk-in closet rack, where I breathed in abrasive fibers from some sweaters hanging there. I woke up with a wool hangover and the vague notion that I had been in this closet before. A disembodied voice arrests me. I am unable to move. The sound vibrates all the fluids of my body, creeps out of my blood and into my bones. I could be your lover, let’s pretend!… A silly moth flutters against the wickedness of a flower moon, rising against a trough for cats to drink from while mamma’s away… It seems logical that the future-body will be one that is more storable, able to be stashed and stowed away at the convenience of the stower. The future-body will speak from this position. The bodies of vampiric teens — the post-adolescent undead — will be infinitely more portable because their converted blood will keep for several months even though the body is stashed folded in on itself in various confined and dark places. These bodies lapse into a hibernation state: one of physical stasis, but psychic hyperactivity. Sex dreams and sex nightmares. Waking into a negative space, an anti-dream where motor skills collapse. My body loses its shape and is in danger of taking the shape of anybody who’s around. Limbs lay lifeless on either side, eyes fixed in a single target, dead weight shifting under their whims. Who does the body devour? The body devours whomever it wants, is satisfied by its indifference… I found a notebook on the doorstep of our trailer. In it were drawings of women in bondage, hanging from rafters, restrained chin-to-knees on top of hay bales. As the drawing
s progressed I got the sense that the girls in them were more and more reconciled to their fate. The last drawing wore a strange toothy smile. I clapped it shut in disgust and brought the book inside, stashing it under the oven in that random metal drawer down there. The neighbor planted it for me to see and get freaked out by. It was his way of making us get out of the area. Next I’d imagine he would stomp over here with that big wrench again. I began to think more and more clearly about the dead body and the VHS tape, the recorded evidence of wrongdoing. The footage. That word! — Implying a covering of ground, one large foot upon the land. One slithering, unbroken sweep. Her shattered remains placed upon that thread, unraveling outward. I could see her, I mean I could tell it was a girl’s body, but I couldn’t recognize her yet. Her face was blurry. And the killer, the man. Should I name him? I just don’t know. Just a man, an enforcer without a badge… At midnight in Salem my drunk boyfriends propped me up as we walked across a series of parking lots to 7-Eleven. I crumpled to the floor, clutching a big white bucket filled with cold coffee cuz I was bracing for puke, while the others pinned the clerk to the wall behind the register with a long shaft of rebar. Josh reached around and yanked down packs of cigarettes while the clerk screamed at us. My eyes got lost in the silvery mass, at the slick of brown oil guarding the swamp beneath. I fell in and found a storm brewing at the bottom of the bucket, gripping the rim even harder as it passed over my body in chills, a fever of ice.

  I could see how you, little girl, could be lured down a scraggly mud path down to a creekbed, under the cover of big redwood trees.Could be led this way by a boyfriend, perhaps. An ally. Told you could leave your purse hanging on one of the low branches. There were patches of ferns, a heavy wet grass, other soft round leaves. Petals. The ground was soaked and swollen with water but red dust hung in the air, settling and solidifying into a black paste. There was rot everywhere. Later, the scene circumscribed with hyper-yellow crime tape. Crime scene/off scene. The area of rot may have masked itself off from the rest of the world but not from watchful eyes and perceptive minds seething like a smokestack so many miles away. I blew out a candle at night. Waxy soot eked into my lungs as the cover of darkness allowed me to flow freely to thoughts of fabric hanging over the windows of the trailer in the woods: tweed, plaid, pink and brown. Concentrating on curtains covered in black mold hanging in a trailer somewhere in the sticks, on a flat parcel of soaked straw and burlap… There were whole days of it. Coughing against a backdrop of burning gas. A sky that burned as orange as an intestine. Living within grappling distance of the world’s biggest loozers, beating them as they winked at me. The surveillance video showed them scraping some girl off the pavement, somewhere halfway around the world. Militiamen do a dance with shovels. It looks like the whole place would smell like plastic vomit. They stuff the girl in the back seat of a car and drive away. The news footage dramatically fades to red and the anchor makes some kind of joke about murder being “radical” again. I think the word he used was actually “rad.” “If anyone hasn’t guessed yet, there’s a fucking war going on.” The membrane closes around the cat’s eyes, white shutters oozing across… my mouth shuts around the big black and white cross hanging from my neck. Sucking on that big plastic cross makes me happy. My canine teeth grow longer and soon I can’t exactly close my mouth the same, but y’know I became a killing and eating machine, adept at stuffing and slurping. I like my new teeth, don’t you?

  I came to throwing up in a trashcan, the container sizzled and cracked in half. The man was gone, but I don’t think he bailed, just went to get some cigarettes and grapefruit juice. I lay back down like I was in my fuckin coffin and stayed there for a long time. Eventually I caught a bus out of town and spent a lot of time walking around various townships, whatever narrow strip of land surrounded the bus station, walked until I fell to my knees and vomited in a creekbed. Stretched out, bloated, breathing shallow breaths under the exposed roots of a massive redwood on a muddy bluff. Passed out on the hood of a blue Honda in the rain, waking up with someone else’s greasy sock balled up in my hand… making soup out of pond water and lily pads… drinking a big cup of non-dairy creamer at 7-Eleven in the hot afternoon… picking up a duck in a park and walking around with it under my arm all afternoon. I also picked up rich dudes with blond hair, some careless jerks, one teen crush I sodomized, and made millions of letters to you in my mind — this is the sound of my soul writing this one to you, okay? Listen. It’s spelled out between the breaths of all the kids that sleep on the street, waiting for you to pass by. All the tramps who taunt you, sluts in your city, slimy teens squatting around town with their tiny bodies bundled up all year round, urchin mystics with the rare ability to see ghosts out of the corner of their eyes. All the heshers, thrashers, stoners, gakkers, skaters, graff toys, rockabilly greasers, Dharma Punx, reptile tweakers — will they ever really get to you before they themselves are absorbed into the pavement, or swept up into the sky? Our kind is doomed… It’s just that your lifestyle doesn’t include me — it just so happens that none of this applies to me. My traumas are individual and specific and private… I was angry that there was a guy going around killing prostitutes and girls who lived on the street — some who had run away, others who had bad homes. But where was the distinction anymore? A slut is a slut is a slut. You can be whatever it is you say you are. If you’re only 14 or 15 none of it applies to you anyway. No moral person would ever hold you to any of it. It was simply “girl” then. The older man took a girl out into the woods, or behind a building and put his hands around her neck. Then threw her away like a bag of garbage. No one nobody should ever call her those things. None of it sticks. None of it sits right… The girl lay sleeping like a painted statue on her side. Pulsing invisible air out of her nose. Flows coming in, flows coming out. All day horror and gore. Serious thoughts were whispered over dusty airwaves. Vibrations received in time to change the outcome of events… I came to be known as the one who could do without suffering, one who was already dead and couldn’t stand the thought of lying down long enough to be covered with dirt. Walking in the forest at night, feeling in front of me for the way out, I could smell an animal presence rendered as plain as an image in front of my face, a black sheet hanging in a smell like wet bear fur. I trudged on even though I froze inside and it was just as suddenly gone. I guess I had moved through it. Walking; walking all night on the roadkill tour of Oregon. Flattened hawks every few miles on the freeway. How do you run over a bird of prey? The more I walked the more it seemed that some of the carcasses could not be identified as any particular animal. Just pulpy bundles of feathers. Two flattened scraps of tire tread lay side by side like blackened hides on the freeway. Elsewhere, with gassy lights burning in the distance my mind jogs to place the animal carcass before me. What is it? A cat? A rat? What do I most want it to be?… I wandered into a 7-Eleven for no reason in particular. People yelled at me and looked the other way. I moved things off the shelves and into corners of the room where fluid had collected. I used loaves of bread and boxes of brand-name cereal snack mix to stem the flows seeping in from every corner. The cereal turned black. In a parking lot I once found a photo of a strange-looking girl dated from the first decade of the 20th century. It amused me at the time. But today when I was rifling through a bunch of my pamphlets I found the photograph again and it freaked me out with a sidelong glance of pure evil and I had to shut it away fast. This youngish woman, a hunchback lady with no neck and a lopsided patch of wiry hair, sits backward on a chair gripping the backrest with pained delight: 1916. She wears the checked pinafore of a girl but she… is… no… human!

  We strapped on as many supplies as possible. We were going climbing over the land and no vehicle but our bodies would take us there. Needles were sewn into seams, razor blades and ammo were taped along the insides of our arms. Emergency rations concealed in vials all up our legs, hidden compartments in the heels of our boots were filled with gel caps; our bodies were accustomed to weathering the challenges o
f the journey. All around us shewolves licked at their wounds. Purple leaves heaved to the ground, growing heavy with rain. I came upon an unlocked car under a burnt out old tree trunk and climbed inside, becoming evermore blind as the glass fogged around me. Losing it is the only way to saveme. I sank deeper; blood leached out into the pebbles below, bringing them back to life. The vinyl seats had cracked in telling patterns revealing dusty tan sponge forms underneath; the surface had recorded every shed cell the forest had ever exhaled. Dust settled in layers over me too, making me part of the oppressive scheme I’d tried lamely to resist. I became historical too, I guess, just another rock. Lying there I began playing back the topography of every little room I had ever occupied. My fingerprints glowed white all over the surfaces in each and I could see the little white dots slowly moving the objects themselves. Radiation burned my image onto the wall. Dust froze my contour onto the sheets, the coddling swath my tar pit trap. Tar caught in my mouth. My shadow on the wall traced cells rubbing off every contour of my enclosure. I seemed to have lived here forever. But this radiation image was the only record that I had ever lived, a cumulative residue over mottled drywall: invisible, unshakable, and distant. It had taken years, but after the rains swept through, water seeping between the interior and exterior walls had settled onto the surface. Moisture gathered in the charged area to the point where black mold took my form on the surface.

  Kim always had a ponytail and wore black pants. She had me before any other boy or man ever did. She threw my precious gift into the air and watched it fall down. This is a few years ago — when we were young. Kim got sick of our stepdad and the way he touched her all the time: rubbing her shoulders, squeezing her knee, staring intently her way with his voice soft and cooing. Me he left alone. I went whole days without seeing him. After Kim left he wasn’t really in the picture. I was busy hatching plans that went outside the scope of “mom,” “dad,” and our house. House Mom’s projects took up a lot of the mental energy around the place anyway. She started making me clothes, but I didn’t wear them. Except the aprons. “Gracias, dude,” I said as I snatched one on my way out. It wasn’t long before I moved away and later I heard something bad happened to my sister; she was riding trains with a bunch of rowdy gutter types, turning tricks in bus station restrooms, when she disappeared for several months. It’s easy to disappear when you live in and out of public places — you’re invisible anyway — but she was just gone-gone. Not even any train people had seen her, and I know some of them, they see everything that goes on in their fucked up community. But they didn’t see her. I had some idea that something really bad happened to her. Maybe she ended up in a creekbed in the forest, or behind a Spokane Safeway. Those were my two persistent visions. The facts on these are iffy; I had just keyed into what was already present in my scary Robitussin fantasies. When I’d crash out I’d sleep fake sleep and get weird ideas, in a sort of low blood sugar coma. When I get ESP I can see things happening from far away, I can see things that are about to happen. I kept seeing a creekbed. I kept seeing the back of a Spokane Safeway. I didn’t see any body, but I felt bad about the whole thing, like my own self was being pressed into something I didn’t recognize. Up against a mossy wall, steel chilling my back. Grim ideas. When I started riding rails myself that fall, getting paid for blowing jerks in bus stations across the Northwest, I thought the touch of many men would be disorienting. But it was just so obvious. And I fell asleep under it every night — when I started dreaming incessantly of you